At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor
By Sandra Cisneros
These days I admit
I am wide as a tule tree.
My underwear protests.
And yet,
I like myself best
without clothes when
I can admire myself
as God made me, still
divine as a maja.
Wide as a fertility goddess,
though infertile. I am,
as they say,
in decline. Teeth
worn down, eyes burning
yellow. Of belly
bountiful and flesh
beneficent I am. I am
silvering in crags
of crotch and brow.
Amusing.
I am a spectator at my own sport.
I am Venetian, decaying splendidly.
Am magnificent beyond measure.
Lady Pompadour roses exploding
before death. Not old.
Correction, aged.
Passé? I am but vintage.
I am a woman of a delightful season.
El Cantarito, little brown jug of la Lotería.
Solid, stout, bottom planted
firmly and without a doubt,
filled to the brim I am.
I said the brim.
About the Author:
(Excerpt is taken from; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sandra-cisneros)
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, a short story writer, a novelist, and an essayist who explores the lives of working-class people. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, and 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her novel The House on Mango Street (1984) has sold more than six million copies, has been translated into more than 25 languages, and is required reading in elementary schools, high schools, and universities across the nation. A new book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, a story told in English and in Spanish, was published in 2021. In the fall of 2022, a new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, Cisneros’s first collection in 28 years, was published by Knopf and by Vintage Español in a Spanish-language translation, Mujer sin vergüenza, by Liliana Valenzuela. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. As a single woman, she chose to have books instead of children. She earns her living by her pen.